Hard Times in the Lands of Plenty: Oil Politics in Iran and Indonesia Review

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(More customer reviews)Unfortunate honesty... only review here is from my mother, Judy Rae Smith. Loving she is, but unbiased she is not. Ok.
I think the book does a decent job of explaining why some large oil-exporting countries evince political instability while most others don't. One thing I think it does well, and innovatively, is to establish the conditional effects of oil wealth--which some immensely smart scholars like Thad Dunning, Miriam Lowi and others have also elucidated. But it is imperfect, and I enjoy reviewing the article and book-length manuscripts by others who challenge, elaborate, my arguments in Hard Times. Mostly I was after accumulation of knowledge in writing it, and truthfully so many good pieces of research have come my way in the last three years that I am confident that has happened. See my author's page for contact information if you want directions to such research. --Ben Smith

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The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality (Family and Public Policy) Review

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(More customer reviews)Jacobs & Gerson present a clear explication of the conflict between work and family encountered by so many parents today. They review popular hypotheses (e.g. Americans work more hours than they used to), examine the relevant research, and provide sound and clearly reasoned conclusions. THE TIME
DIVIDE clarifies precisely why current workplace structures are
incompatible with the realities of family life today - and why this is especially the case for professionals, like the lawyers I coach. I applaud Jacobs and Gerson for making clear
that work/life conflict is a social policy issue of enormous
importance. They make a compelling case for the ways in which
individual choices are constrained by workplace demands and social norms. If every law firm partner read this book, would things finally change enough so that women lawyers would have a fair chance at success and leadership? Would that it were so.

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Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (Cornell Studies in Political Economy) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is an excellent book to have a compared vision on the three great crisis of capitalism before the 21th century. It gives us a wide view of economic and political tranformations occurred in countries like the USA, Germany, the UK, Swenden and France. All countries and periods were carefully chosen. The periods because they offered an opportunity to analyse the answers that a set of countries gave to face international crisis. The Countries were selected in function of their similarities as participants of the developed world, with, during most of the time, competitive and plural democracies. They also have similarities on the answer given to the crisis.
The cor dimension of the text is tio demonstrate how each country shaped their interpalys of societal internal actors with the international flows of capital, goods and instabilities. There were times where the inter-class coalitions coincided, but the answers, did not. In other cases, the coalition diferred, but the answers were quite similars.
The only weak point, in my opinion, his the lack of references to primary sources related to the selected countries. By the way, excellent book to have a critical overview of how we get here,in the first crisis of the 21th century, and what are the realtions with the past ones.

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Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America Review

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(More customer reviews)For years I've thought of Europe as like the grandfather... sitting on the porch, watching America in action. He sits there, somewhat envious, reminiscing about the days when he used to be the top dog himself. But the envy is shortlived; in truth, he would never trade places with us, for he knows that the true cost of being able to call yourself #1 is far too high.
Money and power, after all, aren't everything.
In Take Back Your Time, de Graaf looks at a culture that is all about the material short term and cannot see beyond. It's a book that reminds us that it's OUR time, that this is a commodity that we CHOOSE to trade for things like money, status and comfort. I use the word 'remind' loosely--in truth, it's almost a new concept, for many. We hear stories of millionaires on their deathbed who would give everything to have one more year, yet other millionaires will do 15 hours tomorrow rather than think about it. Our culture is basically designed to HAVE TO work like this: the economy would go bust if we put anything before money. You could argue it's always been that way, but not to this extreme: every year we trade more hours so as to buy bigger houses, better cars, more gadgets, etc.This is a book that all of America needs to read. If only we had the time.


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